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Tuesday, February 24, 2009

GMail has gone down (and it seems I lost some setting...)

It's sort of a news I won't tell you anything new because all of the world is talking about this: GMail has been down for hours and Google hasn't (yet) given any explanation about the service outage. The thing that drives me crazy it's that it seems I lost the labels' configuration: they all reset their color to that pale yellow they had before customizing (each of) them.

Yes, it's not that bad: I could have lost data, who knows... and it wouldn't be the first time for it to happen with GMail. But these little details throw a shadow about the reliability of a service I'm running without any concern or doubt about its stability. I'm acting as if I thought it was absolutely bullet-proof. I do no gmail backup and never store a copy of my emails in any of the computers I use. I don't even backup my contacts or calendar details.

My fault, I admit, but Google service quality and ubiquity made me accustom to them: I know they're there, when I want, wherever I want, whichever device I could be using.

Should think about that very famous beta tag and value my personal data for what they're worth.

Edit on 02/25/2009: Today I opened the browser and discovered that the settings made their way back into my account! Google accustomed us to high levels of service and we tend to magnify the importance of every problem, even though taking into account the critical importance these services have for the tenths of thousands of users that every day log in in Google servers. If I paid for it, I would expect something more from it, especially in terms of post-mortem diagnosis and explanations from Google. Today, I still don't know what happened yesterday to GMail.